Sidney Nolan

The artist
The Brookfield Multiplex collection, Perth; purchased from the above in 1985

Sir Sidney Nolan: Trio, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Bulleen, 2 April - 19 May 1985, cat. 29, (illus., cover)
Sidney Nolan, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2 November 2007 - 3 February 2008; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 22 February - 18 May 2008; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 6 June - 31 August 2008, cat. 106

Brian Adams, Sidney Nolan: such is life, Melbourne: Hutchison, 1987, pp. 249 - 252
Brian Adams, 'Sidney Nolan versus Australia', Sydney Morning Herald (Good Weekend), 18 April 1987, pp. 16 - 18
Gary Catalano, 'Crucial role of the still life', Age, 10 April 1985, p. 14
Janet Hawley, 'Nolan: secrets of a painter's life', Age (Saturday Extra), 14 February 1987, pp. 1-2
Michael Montague, 'Nolan on exhibit', Sun (Easter Supplement), 11 April 1985, p. 6
Barry Pearce, Sidney Nolan 1917 - 1992, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007, p. 212 (illus.)

There is a minor scratch in the centre of a hill, upper left hand corner near rebate and a small scuff on the bottom rebate (centre). This work is in good condition.
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Sidney Nolan was famously prolific, and when concentrating on a series would often work at furious speed. As he described it: 'Oh, I'm very fast. If I'm rolling, I can do a great deal in a day. I can do a whole exhibition in a week, if I'm in top form. If that sounds terrible, you have to remember that Mozart wrote overtures in a night. You almost do it in a trance. You don't make any mistakes...I'll keep painting for ten hours or longer. You get in a kind of abstracted state that you do not want to interrupt, so keep on going. As long as you don't make any mistakes - they slow you up. But when you get that run it's a wonderful feeling, out the pictures come'¹

The present work came out in a day or so, 'using big brushes and both his hands.'² One of five large landscapes commissioned by the Victorian Arts Centre for the interior of the State Theatre,³ it was painted at 'Bundanon', Arthur Boyd's New South Wales South Coast property, during Nolan's visit to Australia in 1984. In September the artist had spent some weeks accompanying the crew filming Graeme Clifford's Burke and Wills in the Central Desert, and the suite of outback landscapes was immediately inspired by that journey, and obviously by the resurgence of Nolan's own images of the doomed explorers. However, the paintings also represent a summary or distillation of all his prior 'desert and drought' explorations: from Queensland and Central Australia in the late 1940s and early 1950s⁴ to his more recent journeys to the Pilbara and Broome in 1982 and 1983.

Nolan's capacity for the imaginative reconstruction of place - whether St Kilda, Africa or the Antarctic - recalls Wordsworth's famous definition of poetry as 'emotion recollected in tranquillity.' As Nolan himself later put it: 'I can paint anywhere. I can sit here at "Bundanon" and paint China. It's a facility I've learned. What happens is all in the mind anyway.'⁵  The present work is a demonstration of the artist's ability to synthesise visible and mental worlds, perception and recollection. Here, Nolan revisits images more than thirty years old and more. The painting's lumpy mountain shapes are late echoes of earlier desert anthills and baobabs, and their red, visceral corrugations inevitably recall the great aerial desert landscapes, while the flat patchiness of the upper edge 'sky' even has something of the Wimmera pastels of the early 1940s. At the same time, Bungle Bungle is a masterly description of the essence of the real east Kimberley landscape, uncannily prefiguring the paintings of local indigenous artists, from Queenie McKenzie to Eubena Nampitjin.

The State Theatre commission was at rather short notice, but Nolan's 'enthusiasm for the project led him into what he [called] "a lucky streak" and he was able to work at a rapid pace with few interruptions. After a sustained effort he was quite pleased with the results that dominated the lofty, wood-panelled studio; five large-scale canvases of glowing Australian landcscapes, at once bright and muted, combining bold forms with intriguing small details that characterised a new, loosely relaxed style that had been seen in his recent works from China.'⁶

However, when the works were despatched to Melbourne, the Arts Centre's interior designer JohnTruscott declared that they were 'too bright'⁷, and they were not accepted. Janet Hawley relates how Nolan 'was in his Sydney hotel suite, intending to fly to Melbourne the next day for the unveiling, when Truscott telephoned...   The five paintings were returned with no payment, no letter of explanation, nothing. Furious, Nolan shortly afterwards sold one of the paintings for well in excess of the entire commission fee.'⁸

The only one from this important series to have come onto the market, Bungle Bungle is a free and joyous painterly construction, and one of the most highly resolved of Nolan's later works. It constitutes a resonant coda to a lifetime of painting the Australian landscape.

1.  Sidney Nolan, quoted in Janet Hawley, Encounters with Australian artists, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1993, p. 174
2.  Brian Adams, Sidney Nolan: such is life, Hutchinson of Australia, Melbourne, 1987, p. 250
3.  The others were of Uluru (Ayer's Rock), Kata Tjuta (Mt Olga), Atila (Mt Conner) and Palm Valley, near Alice Springs.
4.  See Geoffrey Smith, Sidney Nolan: desert and drought, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003
5.  Nolan, in Hawley, op. cit., p. 174
6.  Adams, op. cit., p. 250
7.  Brian Adams, 'Sidney Nolan versus Australia', Sydney Morning Herald (Good Weekend), 18 April 1987, p. 16
8.  Janet Hawley, 'Nolan: secrets of a painter's life', Age (Saturday Extra), 14 February 1987 p. 1